[Python-Dev] PEP: New timestamp formats

[Victor Stinner]

> I don't see any real issue of adding datetime as another accepted
> type, if Decimal is also accepted. Each type has limitations, and the
> user can choose the best type for his/her use case.
>
> I dropped datetime because I prefer incremental changes (and a simpler
> PEP is also more easily accepted :-)). We can add datetime later when
> most developers agree that datetime issues are no more issues :-)

About incremental changes, I wrote a patch (timestamp_datetime.patch)
to support the datetime.datetime type using my API:
http://bugs.python.org/issue13882#msg152571

Example:

$ ./python
>>> import datetime, os, time
>>> open("x", "wb").close(); print(datetime.datetime.now())
2012-02-04 01:17:27.593834
>>> print(os.stat("x", timestamp=datetime.datetime).st_ctime)
2012-02-04 00:17:27.592284+00:00
>>> print(time.time(timestamp=datetime.datetime))
2012-02-04 00:18:21.329012+00:00
>>> time.clock(timestamp=datetime.datetime)
ValueError: clock has an unspecified starting point
>>> print(time.clock_gettime(time.CLOCK_REALTIME, timestamp=datetime.datetime))
2012-02-04 00:21:37.815663+00:00
>>> print(time.clock_gettime(time.CLOCK_MONOTONIC, timestamp=datetime.datetime))
ValueError: clock has an unspecified starting point

I still don't know if using UTC is correct.

Victor